The Jews of Color Initiative’s grantmaking supports field-building. Our six newest grants help advance efforts of JoC leaders and allies who build the field for Jews of Color by creating fellowship opportunities, providing dynamic and spiritually engaged leadership support and communities, guiding teens in anti-oppression work, and more. Read below for summaries of our six newest grantees.
The Forward: Jews of Color Fellowship
In partnership with the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, JoCI is supporting two Jews of Color Fellows within the fellowship program at The Forward, focusing on newsroom journalism and the media business. This program will support two Jews of Color interested in journalism, and will help them develop durable media skills that translate across the field. The program aims to launch these JoC fellows into successful careers as journalists or media business professionals at Jewish and secular outlets.
Jewish Social Justice Roundtable: JoC Mentorship Program
The Jewish Social Justice Roundtable (JSJR) is in the third year of their Jews of Color mentorship program. This third year includes a newly required field-building and accountability mechanism, data collection, and program evaluation. This year will have an increase in mentoring sessions offered and deliver The Management Center training for supervisors of JOC participants in the JSJR community.
The IOWA Project, a project of The Kirva Institute: Dismantling Racism from the Inside Out
The IOWA Project is excited to bring the first JoC IOWA Project Rabbinic intern onto the team to help grow capacity to bring the spiritual technologies and practices of Mussar (applied Jewish ethics) and Chassidut (applied Jewish mysticism) to Jewish people/communities of color. This will greatly increase The IOWA Project’s capacity to offer BIPOC specific va’ads/learning communities, which will ultimately grow the pool of BIPOC social justice leaders that can be cultivated as mussar facilitators themselves.
Moving Traditions: Supporting JoC Track of Kumi: An Anti-Oppression Teen Leadership Program
Moving Traditions recently launched a new national initiative for Jewish teens called Kumi (meaning “wake up” or “rise up”). It is a unique program in the Jewish teen and racial justice landscape in that it helps to prepare 10th, 11th and 12th graders for bold leadership and activism on college campuses, in social justice spaces, and wherever else their passions take them. In Spring 2023, the program had its first JoC Empowerment track as a part of its multiracial cohort. JoCI funding supported the JoC track and the JoC staff working on the track.
JOIN for Justice
JoCI funding is supporting professional development and mentorship with a BIPOC executive coach for the JoC leader of JOIN for Justice’s Jews of Color Organizing Fellowship.
The Jewpanese Project
The Jewpanese Project explores the lived experiences and stories at the intersection of being Jewish and Japanese. This multi-phase project will culminate in an online exhibit of the project’s findings. The phase of the project that JoCI is supporting will focus on transcribing and aggregating the data from the 40 U.S. based interviews with Jewpanese individuals and families to share findings on identity, religion, immigration, access to language and culture, inclusion/exclusion from community, intergenerational trauma, celebration, and much more. Follow the journey on Instagram @JewpaneseProject.